


Family

by rathernotmyname



Series: Fictober! 2020 [31]
Category: Papillon (2018)
Genre: Chronic Pain, Domestic Fluff, Ferocious Chickens, Fictober! Day 31, Fluff without Plot, Louis wants a kitten, M/M, Papi can't say no anyway, Poor Louis, Reference to Saint Martin's Day, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, because I don't think they celebrated Halloween in France in the 60s?, in short: they get a kitten
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:00:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28108194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rathernotmyname/pseuds/rathernotmyname
Summary: Papi groans as the sun shines cheerily through the curtains and directly into his eyes. It feels like standing in floodlight, and it’s there every. Fucking. Morning.Or:They escaped, they have chickens and a garden, they are in love, everything couldn't be better.
Relationships: Henri "Papillon" Charriere/Louis Dega
Series: Fictober! 2020 [31]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2050200
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Family

**Author's Note:**

> Author's note:  
> I DO NOT CONSENT TO MY WORK BEING HOSTED OR REPOSTED ON ANY UNOFFICIAL APPS OR WEBSITES OTHER THAN ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN WITHOUT MY APPROVAL, PARTICULARLY APPS WITH AD REVENUE AND SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES.

The bed really needs to be moved to the other side of the room.

Papi groans as the sun shines cheerily through the curtains and directly into his eyes. It feels like standing in floodlight, and it’s there every. Fucking. Morning.

Louis had refused to help move the bed, because he apparently likes to “wake up with the sun” and then just relax for a while, as opposed to years of getting shouted out of bed and put to work immediately. 

Papi gets it, he really does. What he doesn’t get is the need to be blinded every day; he’d be much better off with sleeping in and then relaxing outside in the sun at breakfast.

Well, maybe that’s wishful thinking, since they have the chickens, and they want to be fed. God help them if Louis is not on time. Papi still finds feathers in the bedroom from the one time when Louis’ favourite chicken had broken in and had fluttered, clucked and complained until Louis got up.

Unsurprisingly, the space next to him is empty when Papi turns to the side, arm flopping onto the abandoned pillow. With a long-suffering sigh, Papi gets up, shuffling to the closet to take out comfortable trousers and a shirt, which he doesn’t button up. The he puts his feet into his slippers and makes his way to the kitchen.

It’s empty, as well, as he thought, but there’s a freshly brewed pot of coffee on the counter. Papi yawns and stretches, throwing a glance out of the window just to see a fat, brown chicken staring back at him, then he flap, flap, flap, shuffles to the bread bin. 

The chicken on the other side of the window clucks excitedly at the sight of the bread. 

“No,” Papi grumbles, voice gruff with sleep, “you had your breakfast already. It’s my turn, now.”

He hears steps coming closer to the backdoor, and shortly after the door opens and Louis comes in, an empty bucket in his hand and straw sticking in his hair. 

His wild, out-of-control-mop of curls had to be shorn off as soon as they arrived in Venezuela, tangled beyond repair and, in an incidence of truly bad luck, infested with lice, and Papi had shaved off his own blond locks in an act of empathy. 

After that, they had looked more like escaped inmates than before, so finding a place to live in peace had been hard. Louis’ paintings had evened their way just enough that they could afford a small, run-down house that was barely more than a shack. It would probably be horribly draughty as soon as the temperature fell, but they agreed to worry about that when winter came.

The first thing they had built was a small chicken coop. 

Since chickens were expensive, Papi had stolen a few fertilized eggs from a farmer close by, and Louis had cared for them with the help of a makeshift incubator. To their delight, two of the chicks had been male, which had made their flock of chickens double up in less than a year. 

They had paid for the materials to build a bigger bed by selling eggs. Papi is still thinking about taking on a job at the local restaurant, while Louis paints and paints and paints and sometimes manages to sell his works, but he never gets much money for them. The village is poor, and so are they, but they make enough to get by.

Now, Louis’ hair is freshly washed and soft, sweet curls starting to pile up on his head, still not long enough to do anything but frizz and flurry up in the humid air.

“Good morning, Henri,” Louis says, words flowing from his lips like a charm. He doesn’t use the name often, but when he does, it always carries some sort of meaning behind it. This time, it is heavy and whispers of love.

“Good morning,” Papi answers, cutting off a piece of bread and kissing Louis before shoving it into his mouth. “How are the tomatoes coming along?”

“One died,” Louis sighs and falls onto a chair, hands moving to massage his leg, face tight with pain. “I found some sort of caterpillar on its remains. Isn’t a tomato plant supposed to be a solanum?”

“Maybe it didn’t know that,” Papi quips, ambling back to the window, flap, flap, flap.

“Right.”

The chicken is still there, looking very impatient. Papi surrenders and opens the window, throwing a few crumbs onto the window sill. The chicken pounces on it as if it’s being starved. 

“Did you have a pet when you were younger?” Louis asks suddenly, looking thoughtful when Papi turns around to face him.

“No, but my grandfather had a dog. It was always put on a chain in his front yard, snarling at anyone who tried to pass. Even bit me once.”

Louis’s face crumbles. “I hate people who do that to dogs. Always hated them.”

“Weren’t you scared of dogs?”

“Well, yes. But I still didn’t want to throw stones at them or torment them.”

Papi grins. “You softie.”

“Oh, shut up.”

A short bout of silence follows, only broken by Papi chewing his piece of bread. 

“Are you still scared of dogs?”

“…”

“Alright.”

Louis quickly begins to speak. “I mean, if the dog is still very young, we could train him not to bite, right? I can surely-”

“Louis,” Papi says, reaching out and grabbing both of his narrow shoulders, “we don’t have to. I’m happy with all those divas outside.”

As if on cue, the clucking at the window starts up again. The brown chicken has returned, and brought a few others, loudly begging for bread crumbs.

“Dear God,” Louis mutters as they survey the chaos outside. “One would think I don’t feed them at all.”

The current alpha rooster lets out an eardrum-shattering scream, and the hens answer with enraged clucking, but they leave the window alone and scatter.

“They get that from you,” Papi says after they stand in stunned silence for a second. “Bloody annoying, but still in possession of a smidgen of common sense.”

Louis frowns and sticks his nose into the air, pouting. 

Papi thinks it’s adorable.

“So, to come back to my point… what do you think of cats?”

“Can’t say I don’t like them, and we don’t have a lot of delicate glassware a cat could throw off the table. Would a cat be compatible with your painting, though?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well, as soon as the cat knows that it’s not allowed to walk over your paintings, it’s gonna do it out of spite.”

“I’m aware.”

“So that won’t be a problem? And what about the chickens?”

Louis shakes his head, then turning his eyes to the ceiling in thought. “The cat of the baker’s son recently gave birth to a litter of kittens. If we take one and it grows up with the chickens, it’s not going to harm them. They’ll be siblings…”

Papi can’t help but smile, wrapping his arms around Louis and squeezing him. “You obviously put a lot of thought into this.”

Louis shrugs. 

“I’ll take a look at the kittens tomorrow, see if they’re old enough yet.”

Louis’ face lights up in a breathtaking smile. 

“But first, we’re gonna do something for your leg.”

The baker agrees to let Papi take one of the kittens at the end of October. By then, their little house has a new roof and Papi has learned to knit so they have something warm for the winter months. 

When Papi returns home with the kitten making a racket in the box he’s carrying her in, Louis almost bursts into tears at the sight. 

“She’s beautiful,” he sniffles, scratching her small, ginger head. The kitten meows. 

“Did I make a good choice?” Papi asks rhetorically. 

Louis nods. “What’s her name?”

“She doesn’t have one yet. I wanted you to have the honour of christening her.” Papi takes a glass from the cupboard and fills it with warm water.

“What date is it today?” Louis asks absent-mindedly, watching the kitten play with his fingers, a relaxed smile pulling at his lips.

“The thirty-first of October.”

“Martine,” Louis breathes, dunking his fingertips into the glass that Papi holds and sprinkling a few drops onto the kitten’s forehead. “Her name is Martine.”

The chickens accept Martine as part of the family without a second glance. Louis is delighted.

“They can teach her how to catch mice,” he tells Papi, who’s too afraid to ask what he means. 

The bed stays where it is, but it doesn’t really matter anymore. Long before the sun can wake them by rudely shining into their faces, the cat and the chickens invade the bedroom, screaming and complaining as if they will die on the spot if one of them doesn’t stand up right now to feed them. 

Papi volunteers most of the time, so that Louis has more time to get his stiff leg to work without cramping up. 

He doesn’t complain that much anymore, because while their little family of 11 divas (cat and Louis included), one sensible human and 2 cocky roosters can be quite a mess sometimes, he wouldn’t exchange them for anything else in the world. 

Louis’ beaming smile, which seems to pull Papillon in as soon as it appears, tells him that he thinks the same.

**Author's Note:**

> And this marks the end of my personal Fictober 2020! Yay!  
> It was a right joy to write this, even though I think I overdid it a little with the fluff. But who cares! They're thankful for it, I'd say.  
> Thank you for reading, tell me what you think! :D


End file.
